Background

Ethnicity: Borges's mother came from a traditional Uruguayan family of criollo (Spanish) origin.

Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the son of Leonor Acevedo Suárez and Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam. A few years later his family moved to the northern suburb of Palermo.

Education

Jorge Luis Borges received his earliest education at home, where he learned English and read widely in his father's library of English books. When Borges was nine years of age, he began his public schooling in Palermo.

When World War I broke out, in 1914, Borges' family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève (now The Collège Calvin). By 1919, when the family moved on to Spain, Borges had learned several languages and had begun to write and translate poetry.

Career

In Seville and Madrid he frequented literary gatherings where he absorbed the lessons of new poetical theorists of the time-especially those of Rafael Cansinos Asséns, who headed a group of writers who came to be known as "ultraists."

When the family returned to Argentina in 1921, Borges rediscovered his native Buenos Aires and began to write poems dealing with his intimate feelings for the city, its past, and certain fading features of its quiet suburbs. His early poetry was reflective in tone, metaphors dominated, usual linking words were suppressed, and the humble, tranquil aspects of the city that he evoked seemed somehow contaminated by eternity. With other young Argentine writers, Borges collaborated in the founding of new publications, in which the ultraist mode was cultivated in the New World.

In 1923 his first volume of poetry, Fervor of Buenos Aires, was published, and it also made somewhat of a name for him in Spain. In 1925 his second book of poetry, Moon across the Way, appeared, followed in 1929 by San Martin Notebook - the last new collection of his verse to appear for three decades. Borges gradually developed a keen interest in literary criticism. His critical and philosophical essays began to fill most of the volumes he published during the period 1925-1940: Inquisitions (1925), The Dimensions of My Hope (1926), The Language of the Argentines (1928), Evaristo Carriego (1930), Discussion (1932), and History of Eternity (1938).

In 1938, with his father gravely ill from a heart ailment, Borges obtained an appointment in a municipal library in Buenos Aires. Before the year's end, his father died. Borges, himself, came close to death from septicemia, the complication of an infected head injury. This period of crisis produced an important change in Borges. He began to write prose fiction tales of a curious and highly original character. These pieces seemed to be philosophical essays invested with narrative qualities and tensions. Others were short stories infused with metaphorical concepts. Ten of these concise, well-executed stories were collected in Ficciones (1944). The second volume of similar tales, entitled The Aleph, was published in 1949. Borges's fame as a writer firmly rests on the narratives contained in these two books, to which other stories were added in later editions.

After The Aleph, he published an important collection of essays, Other Inquisitions (1952); several collections of poetry and prose sketches, Dreamtigers (1960), In Praise of Darkness (1969), The Deep Rose (1975), and The Iron Coin (1976); and two collections of new short stories, Dr. Brodie's Report (1970) and The Book of Sand (1975). Aside from these works, Borges wrote over a dozen books in collaboration with other persons. Foremost among his collaborators was Adolfo Bioy Casares, an Argentine novelist and short-story writer, who was Borges's closest literary associate for nearly 40 years.

In 1955, following the overthrow of the Peronist regime in Argentina, Borges was named director of the National Library in Buenos Aires. In that same year his sight deteriorated to the point where he became almost totally blind. When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.

From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires and other temporary appointments at other universities. In the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. Borges died of liver cancer on 14 June 1986, aged 86, in Geneva.

Achievements

• Being the pioneer of philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, Jorge Luis Borges was primarily famous as the author of well-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph). His works revealed him as one of the great stylists of the Spanish language. Borges was a notable translator, despite he became completely blind. He translated works of literature in English, French, German, Old English, and Old Norse into Spanish, the best known - a Spanish-language version of a part of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda.
  
  Borges came to international attention in 1961, when he shared with Samuel Beckett the $10,000 International Publishers Prize. In 1970 he was the first recipient of the $25, 000 Matarazzo Sobrinho Inter-American Literary Prize.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Book of Imaginary Beings

    (In a perfect pairing of talent, this volume blends twenty...)

    1957
  • Ficciones

    (The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the whirlwi...)

    1944
  • A Personal Anthology

    (In this anthology, the author has put together those piec...)

    1965
  • Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature

    (Borges takes us on a startling, idiosyncratic, fresh, and...)

    2014
  • Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges

    (These wide-ranging conversations have an exceptionally op...)

    1982
  • Collected Fictions

    (These enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions displa...)

    1941
  • The Aleph and Other Stories

    (Full of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises,...)

    1949
  • Dreamtigers

    (Dreamtigers explores the mysterious territory that lies b...)

    1960
  • Extraordinary Tales

    (This is an anthology of tales from various cultures, drea...)

    1955
  • The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory

    (The Book of Sand is paired with a handful of writings fro...)

    1998
  • A Universal History of Iniquity

    (In his writing, Borges always combined high seriousness w...)

    1935
  • Labyrinths 1962
  • Cuentos completos 1969
  • El hacedor 1960
  • Il libro di sabbia 1975
  • Storia universale dell’infamia 1935
  • Otras inquisiciones 1952
  • Seven Nights 1980
  • Historia de la eternidad 1936

Religion

Borges was not religious but interested in several different religions, visited Israel in 1969 and 1971.

During his final days in Geneva, Borges began brooding about the possibility of an afterlife. Before death, he instructed to call two clergymen, a Catholic priest, in memory of his mother, and a Protestant minister, in memory of his English grandmother. He was visited first by Father Pierre Jacquet and by Pastor Edouard de Montmollin.

Politics

Jorge Luis Borges was one of the supporters of Hipólito Yrigoyen and the social democratic Radical Civic Union between the 1920s and 1930s.

Borges despised Hitler and Franco and the other European despots who caused so much chaos and misery. He disliked totalitarian ideologies of all stripes, communist, fascist, or otherwise. He opposed Nazism, Anti-Semitism, and racism of any kind in no uncertain terms, at a time when these ideologies were not universally rejected even among thoughtful and educated people. He described his membership in Argentina’s conservative party as a proof of his skepticism, presumably skepticism of rigid ideology, of utopian schemes, and the promises of unprincipled politicians.

One aspect of his conservatism was his strong belief in limited government and the importance of individual freedom. He wrote that this belief was common to Argentines, saying jocularly that the Argentine is an individual, not a citizen. Borges believed in restraint on the power of the state. He went so far as to say that the most urgent problem of our time… is the gradual interference of the State in the acts of the individual, describing this evil, whose names are communism and Nazism. Perhaps more importantly, he believed that simple human experiences like friendship were more deserving of protection than the abstract goals of the state another essential conservative idea.

Borges was not active in local politics and mostly kept political affairs at arm’s length throughout his life. However, like the late Marshall Berman said, even if you’re not interested in politics, politics is interested in you. Borges had serious and life-altering run-ins with Juan Peron, the socialist Argentine leader and dictator, and husband of the famous Evita. In 1946, soon after being elected, Peron’s regime took away Borges’ position as a librarian. When Peron left office nearly a decade later in 1955, Borges was honored with an appointment as the director of Argentina’s National Library, but this appointment coincided with Borges becoming completely blind. Borges said that God had granted him books and night at one touch.

The petty insults and career setbacks that Borges suffered at the hands of Peron for many years galvanized his hatred of Peronism. His story The Mountebank is explicitly a denunciation of Juan and Eva Peron and shows the degree to which Borges hated them. When Raúl Alfonsín was elected in 1983, Borges welcomed the end of military rule.

Views

Borges loved the ancient Greek philosophers and other long-dead authors, and in his writings, he frequently invoked the idea that many things were universal across time and space, and that what looked modern was merely a repetition of something ancient. Describing England’s role in defeating the Axis powers, for example, he said that they had returned to wage once more the cyclical battle of Waterloo. He published a number of essays on philosophical issues, the longest and best known to be A New Refutation of Time, and he planned a book on Spinoza which he never wrote.

Jorge Luis Borges's inquiries into metaphysics were quirky, and he invariable treated philosophers, and the systems they proposed, with irony. Indeed, the humor that characterizes much of his writing reflects his agnosticism and skepticism, he is especially ironic about his own inquiries.

Jorge Luis was famously admitted that he tended to be interested in religious or philosophical ideas for their aesthetic value and even for their strange and marvelous elements, and had some of his invented philosophers treat metaphysics as a branch of the literature of fantasy. Rather than using his stories as vehicles for philosophical ideas, he often used those ideas as a starting point for fiction, and the literary use he made of them is more important than the ideas in themselves.

Quotations: "I think a writer's duty is to be a writer, and if he can be a good writer, he is doing his duty. Besides, I think of my own opinions as being superficial. For example, I am a Conservative, I hate the Communists, I hate the Nazis, I hate the anti-Semites, and so on; but I don't allow these opinions to find their way into my writings - except, of course, when I was greatly elated about the Six Days' War. Generally speaking, I think of keeping them in watertight compartments. Everybody knows my opinions, but as for my dreams and my stories, they should be allowed their full freedom, I think. I don't want to intrude into them, I'm writing fiction, not fables."

"I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process."

"I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror."

"So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers."

"Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read."

"Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time."

"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."

"The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream."

"Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much."

"Reality is not always probable, or likely."

"Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism."

"I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat."

"Life itself is a quotation."

"Don't talk unless you can improve the silence."

"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream."

"The original is unfaithful to the translation."

"No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist."

"Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone."

"Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."

"To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely."

"I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes."

"There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her."

"When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place."

"What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?"

"We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real."

"I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets."

"Estoy solo y no hay nadie en el espejo."

"It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day."

"Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts."

"You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?"

"You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well."

"I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive."

"A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships."

"There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music."

"We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights."

"It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors"

"I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else."

"Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved."

"Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits."

"The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men."

"We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe."

"It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA."

"From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me."

"Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not."

"The years go by, and I've told the story so many times that I'm not sure anymore whether I actually remember it or whether I just remember the words I tell it with."

"The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal."

Membership

In 1919 Borges joined the young writers of the Ultraist movement, a group that rebelled against what it considered the decadence of the established writers of the Generation of 1898. He is also credited with establishing the Ultraist movement in South America, though he later repudiated it.

Personality

In reading Borges, one may think that Jorge Luis was a very serious person. He was actually a man who loved jokes and always had unexpected responses to everyday events.

Physical Characteristics: In 1938, Borges encountered a severe head injury that affected his speech and also caused blood poisoning. Borges suffered from total blindness, a hereditary affliction that had also attacked his father and had progressively diminished his own eyesight from the 1920s onward. It had forced him to abandon the writing of long texts and to begin dictating to his mother or to secretaries or friends.

Quotes from others about the person

• "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists." - J. M. Coetzee
  
  "If Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel could have existed in reality, it would have been something like the Long Room of Trinity College." - Christopher de Hamel
  
  "Today one could consider Borges the most important writer of the 20th Century. Because he created a new literary continent between North and South America, between Europe and America, between old worlds and modernity." - Suzanne Jill Levine

Interests

• Borges was an admirer of some Oriental culture, e.g. the ancient Chinese board game of Go, about which he penned some verses.

Connections

In 1967, Borges married the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán. The marriage lasted less than three years. After a legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at age 99.

In April 1986, a few months before his death, Borges married his personal assistant María Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry.

Father:

Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam

(February 24, 1874 - February 14, 1938)

Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam was an Argentine lawyer and writer.

Mother:

Leonor Acevedo Suárez

(May 22, 1876 - July 8, 1975)

Spouse:

María Kodama Schweizer

(born March 10, 1937)

María Kodama Schweizer is the widow of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges and sole owner of his estate after his death in 1986. Borges had bequeathed to Kodama his rights as author in a will written in 1979, when she was his literary secretary, and bequeathed to her his whole estate in 1985.

ex-spouse:

Elsa Astete Millán

Sister:

Norah Borges

(March 4, 1901 - July 20, 1998)

Leonor Fanny "Norah" Borges Acevedo was a visual artist and art critic, member of the Florida group

Friend:

Adolfo Bioy Casares

(September 15, 1914 - March 8, 1999)

Adolfo Bioy Casares was an Argentine fiction writer, journalist, diarist, and translator. He was a friend and frequent collaborator with his fellow countryman Jorge Luis Borges, and is the author of the fantastic fiction novel The Invention of Morel.

Friend:

Norman Thomas di Giovanni

(October 3, 1933 - February 16, 2017)

Norman Thomas di Giovanni was an American-born editor and translator known for his collaboration with Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges.

References

• Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge Jorge Luis Borges is generally acknowledged to be one of the twentieth century’s most significant writers. Yet in all the critical debates on his work, the fact that he is Argentinian is rarely discussed, as if his international reputation had somehow cleansed him of nationality. In this brilliant introduction to his work, Sarlo challenges these universalist readings, arguing that they leave aside vital aspects of Borges’ writing, including his powerful vision of Argentina’s past and its traditions, which placed both the writer and his country at the intersection of European and Latin American culture.
  1993
• Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations This anthology of interviews with Jorge Luis Borges features more than a dozen conversations that cover all phases of his life and work. He discusses his blindness, his family and childhood, early travels, literary friends, and struggles to find his literary identity.
  1998
• Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography
  1978